Critical Essay by Homer Obed Brown

SOURCE: "The Displaced Self in the Novels of Daniel Defoe," in Institutions of the English Novel: From Defoe to Scott, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997, pp. 54–60.

In the following excerpt, Brown explores the need of Defoe's characters for isolation, concealment, and guarded exposure as defenses against threats of "menacing otherness."

… In my youth, I wandered away, too far from your sustaining hand, and created of myself a barren waste.

—Augustine, Confessions

Defoe's novels are based on a notion of radical egocentricity. Robinson wonders why his isolation on the island was "any grievance or affliction" since "it seems to me that life in general is, or ought to be, but one universal act of solitude":

The world, I say, is nothing to us as it is more or less to our relish. All reflection is carried home...